Christopher Alexander - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 頁 1 / 9 Christopher Alexander From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born 4 October 1936 in Vienna, Austria)[1][2] is a widely influential architect and design theorist, and currently emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have had notable impacts across many fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, sociology and other fields.[3] Alexander has also designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.[4][5] In the field of software, Alexander is regarded as the father of Christopher Alexander in 2012. the Pattern Language movement. The first wiki - the technology behind Wikipedia - led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham.[6][7] Alexander's work has also influenced the development of Agile software development and Scrum (software development)[8] In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist movement, to help people to reclaim control over their own built environment.[9] However, Alexander is controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work is often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.[10] Alexander is known for his many books on the design and building process, including Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not a Tree (first published as a paper and recently re-published in book form), The Timeless Way of Building, A New Theory of Urban Design, and The Oregon Experiment. More recently he published the four-volume The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, about his newer theories of "morphogenetic" processes, and The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, about the implementation of his theories in a large building project in Japan. Alexander is perhaps best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language, a perennial seller some four decades after publication.[11] Reasoning that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect could be,[12][13][14] he produced and validated (in collaboration with his students Sarah Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King, and Shlomo Angel) a "pattern language" to empower anyone to design and build at any scale. Contents ◾ 1 Personal life ◾ 2 Education ◾ 3 Honors ◾ 4 Career ◾ 4.1 Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander 2016/5/23 Christopher Alexander - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 頁 2 / 9 ◾ 4.2 Works of Architecture ◾ 4.3 Teaching ◾ 5 Influence ◾ 5.1 Architecture ◾ 5.2 Computer science ◾ 5.3 Religion ◾ 6 Published works ◾ 7 See also ◾ 8 References ◾ 9 Further reading ◾ 10 External links Personal life As a young child Alexander emigrated with his parents from Austria to England, when his parents were forced to flee the Nazi regime. He spent much of his childhood in Chichester and Oxford, England, where he began his education in the sciences. He moved from England to the United States in 1958 to study at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved to Berkeley, California in 1963 to accept an appointment as Professor of Architecture, a position he would hold for almost 40 years. In 2002, after his retirement, Alexander moved to Arundel, England, where he continued to write, teach and build. Alexander is married to Margaret Moore Alexander, and he has two daughters, Sophie and Lily, by his former wife Pamela. Education Alexander attended Oundle school, England. In 1954, he was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge University in chemistry and physics, and went on to read mathematics. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and a Master's degree in Mathematics. He took his doctorate at Harvard (the first Ph.D. in Architecture ever awarded at Harvard University), and was elected fellow at Harvard. During the same period he worked at MIT in transportation theory and computer science, and worked at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies. Honors Alexander was elected Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard University 1961-64; awarded the First Gold Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects, 1972; elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy, 1980; winner of the Best Building in Japan award, 1985; winner of the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Distinguished Professor Award, 1986 and 1987;[15] invited to present the Louis Kahn Memorial Lecture, 1992; awarded the Seaside Prize, 1994; elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996;[3] one of the two inaugural recipients of the Athena Award, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), 2006;. awarded (in absentia) the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum, 2009; awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Urban Design Group, 2011; winner of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, 2014.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander 2016/5/23 Christopher Alexander - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 頁 3 / 9 Career Author The Timeless Way of Building (1979) described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire: There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977) described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar. The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are attractive and harmonious. The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations. The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project. It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs. A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by multiple architects for beauty and practicality. The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and a novel simplified building system that copes with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily stored inexpensive materials, and produces long-lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor. It first has users prototype a structure on-site in temporary materials. Once accepted, these are finished by filling them with very-low-density concrete. It uses vaulted construction to build as high as three stories, permitting very high densities. This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon, as described in The Oregon Experiment (1975), and remains the official planning instrument. It has also been adopted in part by some cities as a building code. The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex engineering task, and has been applied to some of them. It has been especially influential in software engineering where patterns have been used to document collective knowledge in the field. A New Theory of Urban Design (1987) coincided with a renewal of interest in urbanism among architects, but stood apart from most other expressions of this by assuming a distinctly anti- masterplanning stance. An account of a design studio conducted with Berkeley students, it shows how convincing urban networks can be generated by requiring individual actors to respect only local https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander 2016/5/23 Christopher Alexander - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 頁 4 / 9 rules, in relation to neighbours. A vastly undervalued part of the Alexander canon, A New Theory is important in understanding the generative processes which give rise to the shanty towns latterly championed by Stewart Brand,[17] Robert Neuwirth,[18] and the Prince of Wales.[19] The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2003–04), which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground, is Alexander's most comprehensive and elaborate work. In it, he puts forth a new theory about the nature of space and describes how this theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in which we view the world in general. The mostly static patterns from A Pattern Language have been amended by more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly be seen as the end result of sequences). Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his theory of space goes beyond architecture). The online publication "Katarxis 3" (http://www.katarxis3.com/index.html) (September 2004) includes several essays by Christopher Alexander, as well as the legendary debate (http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm) between Alexander and Peter Eisenman from 1982. Alexander's latest book, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (2012), is the story of the largest project he and his colleagues had ever tackled, the construction of a new High School/College campus in Japan.